Posted
by
CmdrTacoon Monday August 06, 2007 @10:16AM
from the trolls-rejoice-in-netcraft-story dept.

benjymouse quotes this month's netcraft survey "In the August 2007 survey we received responses from 127,961,479 sites, an increase of 2.3 million sites from last month. Microsoft continues to increase its web server market share, adding 2.6 million sites this month as Apache loses 991K hostnames. As a result, Windows improves its market share by 1.4% to 34.2%, while Apache slips by 1.7% to 48.4%. Microsoft's recent gains raise the prospect that Windows may soon challenge Apache's leadership position."

I don't think parked domains are considered "active servers." The Netcraft stats show that IIS is gaining ground against Apache even faster among active servers than nonactive servers (see this graph [netcraft.com]). Godaddy switching to IIS would not explain that.

Not likely - if you look at the Netcraft charts, you can see the decline's been steady and consistent for several months (6-9-12 or so IIRC. No, I haven't read the article yet because I was only looking at the Netcraft survey & getting depressed a couple of months back, and I know that I'll be mightily cheered up by the comments in a few hours' time -- the lame humour, I-for-one, accusations of M$-funded FUD, assertions that it's because Windows shops are all full of fules and madmen... and so on. That really gives me hope that Free software will triumph in the end.

Wake up people! IIS Lately is just as secure as Apache, Development with.NET is easier and faster then PHP is for a lot of jobs. Installations doesn't require modifying text files.... Sure apache has its plusses and many of them are substantial. But this Excuses and ignoring the facts will only lead to your own disaster. Much like how mainframes died (or at least greatly diminished) over a decade ago. Sure Mainframes are faster and better then PC components but that is not what the people want. Open Source and Apache is doing the same thing, it is putting in stuff that they think they want not the bulk of their users. People want a GUI configuration tool, People want it to be defaultly built in with a full featured server side language. People don't want to compile their installation with a bunch of of cryptic commands for features they do or do not know what it does. People want GUI Application Development software so what they program will go onto the server. Apache and the OSS Community is doing a poor job in offering such services to the people. So in the spirit of freedom that the OSS Community as given them they feel free to use IIS because it gives them what they need. Most people do not have the time or the will to program these changes, most people only like Open Source Applications because it is free IIS comes already with Windows Server so it is fee enough for them. Don't be stupid and make excuses while more and more market-share slips away go an actively improve your product to help keep the market share you have and perhaps influence others to go back to IIS.

Ok, you're not the first to write that, but I've got to reply to someone, so it's you.

Show me a shop that goes with IIS because of this and I'll show you a shop with crappy IT managers.

If you are an IT manager worth his payment, you realize that if your admins can't handle a machine on the machine level, then the first time something breaks in a way the GUI doesn't provide a flashy wizard for you will be calling in consultants that take ten times as much per hour as your in-house staff does. If you think o

Normally this isn't the only factor. Most of the time it is just because they upgraded their servers to Windows 2003 and it came with it so use what came with it if it works good enough...

I'll accept that. I can also accept the reason that if you are a 100% MS shop, it makes sense to run your website on MS software as well.

But still if it is a case where the manager like the ability in case where a change needs to be done and no IT Guys is found a GUI front end will give them a fighting chance for what could be a simple fix then doing it threw a text file.

If your site is so important that you can't wait for an IT guy to come in, then your web site is too important for any non-admin to touch it. Instead of throwing a GUI at someone who might fix the site, but who might also break it much worse than it currently is, you either need to realize that it can wait, or you put your IT staff on call duty.

Wake up people! IIS Lately is just as secure as Apache, Development with.NET is easier and faster then PHP...

I've got a question for you, and everyone, really.

Do you want operating systems and development software to be forever dominated by a single corporation that charges you what they want for each, even if their stuff is a bit better? I mean, fundamentally, that's what pisses me off. Are we really going to still have a vast number of electronic devices running, and having stuff developed for, Microso

I can't speak for the GP, but I think that he is referring to the application stack, as in LAMP. In that case it isn't so much Apache's fault that PHP has some issues, but the fact that Apache is the main environment for PHP developers causes its name to be sulled by the association.

Experiences of using PHP in Large Websites [ukuug.org]: from 2002, but the basic PHP philosophy hasn't changed since then (although some specifics have). Oversimplification and pandering to less experienced developers hurts the language as a whole.

It's not that PHP is that bad. VB, COBOL and PL/1 were all much worse. It's that there are better languages out there that people never learn because they learned PHP as "n00bs" (you can almost detect a PHP developer by his use of that word) and are complacent with it.

Incidentally, I think it's a lot more mind-expanding to learn two programming languages than to learn one. I see single-language people all the time confusing possibility with possibility in a particular language, or confusing overall algorithms and data structures with particular idioms from their pet language. It's sad.

Likewise, I enjoy a good discussion that doesn't devolve into a flamewar.

Let's establish some objective benchmarks for general-purpose programming languages. Can we agree that it's better for a language to be consistent than not? That it's better to be expressive (as opposed to requiring verbose constructs for simple ideas)? Can we agree that separating code into separate namespaces and modules is a fundamentally good idea? Can we say that "spooky action at a distance" is generally bad? Of course, we should include the each with which a language is learned there too.

A language can't optimize for all these at once, so there's always a tradeoff. Perl trades virtually everything else for expressiveness. Java focuses on consistency. Python, a balance of consistency and expressiveness that you could call aesthetic.

PHP's focus is on being as easy as possible to pick up for the inexperienced programmer who just wants to get his personal task done without having to learn too much about the language.

Consider two animals: animal A reproduces by spawning, and easily has 10,000 offspring. Let's say 0.01% of these offspring go on to reproduce, for an average of 10 offspring per animal A. Now consider an animal B that rears 3 offspring, 90% of which survive to have offspring of their own. In the same niche, animal A will have a huge reproductive advantage over animal B, and animal A will drive B out of its niche in a few generations, ignoring other considerations.

Despite each B being better (say, more intelligent, stronger, faster, etc.), the niche A and B are competing in doesn't require the animal to be better. A is better off, since it devotes its resources to reproducing faster instead of being better individually. If that niche were more demanding, B might be better off.

Now translate that idea into programming language terms. PHP is very easy to pick up for the "n00b", giving it a huge reproductive advantage over other languages. Since PHP is so easy to pick up for mediocre programmers, the typical programmer using PHP will be mediocre. It's not that good people don't use PHP, but that these good people are vastly outnumbered.

Yet PHP is astoundingly successful. What does that tell us?

Most web programming is not hard. The niche is not demanding. PHP, the meme, is better off sacrificing being a "good" language so it can spread, and even in its weakened form, it's more than up for the task. PHP is a more fit language for web programming in an overall sense, if not an individual one.

I'm not arguing that the language designers consciously designed it that way, by the way. I'm merely arguing that that's how it happened. When I say that PHP "wants" this or that, I'm just drawing a metaphor.

Other programming niches, by the way, are more demanding. You'd be hard-pressed to find a language like PHP in, say, compiler-writing. There, the task is harder, so the language, and thus the programmers, are hardier. "Better" languages are more fit for these more demanding niches.

We don't look down on PHP because we secretly desire to be esoteric code-wizards. Instead, we look down on PHP because it's like using a rock to pound in a nail: there are objectively better ways to do what it does, and people who use PHP almost universally use it only out of ignorance.

We try to combat ignorance, but when the people you attempt to educate do nothing but resist new notions, the only response that's left is pity.

If that's the methodology, then the more obvious solution is to base any statistics on IP address, and not on sites. Honestly, I can't imagine why anyone would use a "site" as the primary means of doing web server counts.

Many legitimate hosting sites use a handful of IPs for hundreds or thousands of sites. Counting by IP isn't valid.

Good point. Perhaps there is simply no way of legitimately determining what the underlying platforms are. There are so many webservers out there that maybe the whole notion is bogus.

Personally, I've worked with IIS and Apache. I find IIS a real pain to administer, and often difficult to diagnose problems. Apache is a bit more difficult to get up and running, but having easily accessible configs makes it a lot easier to maintain.

Agreed, I NEVER had to restart an apache because it was hung, only for scheduled maintenance. I worked in a 1000+ server infrastructure till now, and the only pain came from IIS and JAVA servers. Note: yes I know they are apache tomcats at the end (Jboss, WL, WS), but it is a completely different story.

And, by what magic of the new HTTP 2.0 protocol are you running two different server software types on the same IP and on the same port?

Counting by IP address is by far, more accurate than comparing hostnames and sites. So counting by IP is MORE VALID than the method they used. Despite your ignorant little point.

If you want to count individual BOXES, then IP is as close as you are going to get without doing a survey or special fingerprinting of the data to find differences in machines. (It will still be too big, I run 122 IPs with about 350 sites on them. The ratio changes all the time due to customers coming/going and reconfigurations...)

I am going to guess, that the fact that millions of "parking" domains are run for the most part on Apache causes the popularity of that particular activity of lowlife scum to weigh heavily in the Netcraft numbers.

No but if one guy has two IP addresses pointing at his IIS server and the other one only one IP pointing at his Apache server, the server count would be IIS : Apache, 2:1 while the physical server count would still be 1 : 1. This can't be even acceptable as a means for counting Apache installations.

And if another guy has one IP pointing at two IIS servers in a round-robin type serving, then the count would be Apache 2, IIS 1, even though the actual install is different. It's still a better metric than just doing hostname based counting, because vhosts are MUCH more common than multiple IP servers, or even multiple server IP's. It's not perfect, but nothing is, and it sure as hell is a lot closer.

And, by what magic of the new HTTP 2.0 protocol are you running two different server software types on the same IP and on the same port?

Cisco, Foundry, and several other vendors make load balancing [wikipedia.org] devices that allow you to have one public-facing IP distributed to dozens of back-end machines. If you connect to 1.2.3.4 on port 80, you can actually be connected to machine A, B, C, etc.. these machines not necessarily running the same web server software or operating system. In this case the actual public-facing IP is often called a VIP (Virtual IP) since it's not assigned anywhere except on the load balancer.

Counting by IP address is by far, more accurate than comparing hostnames and sites. So counting by IP is MORE VALID than the method they used.

You're right, it depends what you're counting. If you're counting the number of boxes that run a particular web server, then IPs will probably be more accurate, although load balancing will skew this. If you're counting the number of customers those chose IIS vs. Apache, whether or not they are jammed onto a large hosting server with other customers? Counting by sites will be more accurate there, although skewed by domain parking.

Despite your ignorant little point.

I love you too man!

If you want to count individual BOXES, then IP is as close as you are going to get without doing a survey or special fingerprinting of the data to find differences in machines. (It will still be too big, I run 122 IPs with about 350 sites on them. The ratio changes all the time due to customers coming/going and reconfigurations...)

I'm guessing 121 of those sites are SSL? Name-based multihosting and load-balancers mean you normally only ever need one public-facing IP for non-SSL sites. Better yet, all your back-end boxes can be configured identically, with all of the sites on every box, so you can spread the load evenly. Even if your application needs to keep the user on a particular box during a session, the load balancer can be directed to do so.

I am going to guess, that the fact that millions of "parking" domains are run for the most part on Apache causes the popularity of that particular activity of lowlife scum to weigh heavily in the Netcraft numbers.

Many legitimate hosting sites use a handful of IPs for hundreds or thousands of sites. Counting by IP isn't valid.

When trying to find out how many servers that are running IIS or Apache or some other http-server, counting IP's are much more valid than counting sites for just that reason.If one IIS server has one thousand sites, it is still just one IIS server installation.If one Apache server has one thousand sites, it is still just one Apache server installation.Any other way of counting is invalid.The problem comes when one server has several IP's. But that would corrupt the data much less than counting sites on ser

If that's the methodology, then the more obvious solution is to base any statistics on IP address, and not on sites. Honestly, I can't imagine why anyone would use a "site" as the primary means of doing web server counts.

One IP number can represent dozens of name virtual hosts. So if you count IP numbers you get stats favoring IIS, which has closer to a 1:1 ratio (or worse) of machine to web presence. If you count hostnames, you get stats favoring all other HTTP servers.

And if you limit your survey to HTTP compliance then you eliminate all IIS sites. Add in TCP/IP compliance and you eliminate anything hosted on MS Windows [neohapsis.com], accidentally, out of ignorance or otherwise not just IIS but also Lighttpd and Apache.

In fairness to the GP post, his statement is accurate. People were paid to develop IIS and therefore can be called professionals and MS is a well known name. If that makes him sleep better at night and doesn't mind throwing his money around for that solution and its artificial restrictions, so be it.

People were paid to develop Apache. Open source != everybody worked for free.

Um, honestly, the fact that most people are using computers is half the reason RIAA/MPAA/MAFIA is getting so many of these stupid laws passed. I miss the good ol days of 2400baud personally. Tech was different and so was the culture back then.

Subsection A, Paragraph B clearly states that boat analogies must be used in lieu of car analogies on all Microsoft vs. OSS stories. We just don't have the technology to construct a metaphorical car powerful enough to overcome the figurative bullshit.

People (I.T. guys included) will almost always go with what they are comfortable with. IIS is very easy to configure and you could have a Windows Server up and running in no time. With Apache, it's not so simple. Modifying text files gives the admins great control over nearly everything; but it's not so simple. And some n00b admin couldn't exactly master Apache in a weekend like they could IIS.

I personally use Apache on my servers. But I could also take my good old time configuring them because I'm not planning on making any money from them.

A "n00b admin" isn't going to be able to master anything in a weekend. They might figure out how to set something up & get it working but mastery is a long ways off.

Which sums up the whole windos universe problem very nicely.

Yes, I know current versions of IIS don't even compare to, say IIS 4. I also know that Active Directory and all the other nice features enable you to set up a really great corporate network with some tough security.

Problem is: 99% of the windos admins and/or MCSE people don't know shit. There are exceptions. I've met some. They are a minority. Most corporate networks are run by what in other industries would equate to apprentices.

Some Linux distros come with tools to make setting up Apache easy as well. I just set up a test LAMP stack on my Mandriva desktop and it was very simple, apart form one well known and documented problem (you need to install MySQL before mod_php). All point and click, of course.

Ubuntu can install a LAMP stack for you when you install the OS. I do not find configuration of Apache on Ubuntu so easy though.

I kinda must agree there. I've always been an Apache guy. We use it on lots and lots of servers here, and it's never been that bad to setup. Recently though, we bought an app whose web component is ASP.NET based and needs to run on IIS. While it hasn't gotten me to switch off of Apache on my other boxes, I must say that the configuration utilities and flexibility (not degree but ease with which you can exercise it) was certainly a welcome thing. While I'm sure that Apache can probably do more when fine tuned, if IIS can do 80% of what Apache does with 20% of the effort, it's gonna win some converts.

Some nOOb could think they have mastered IIS in a weekend. Because they could get a web site up and running. That's really part of the problem. People setting up Web Servers not knowing what they are doing.
It's akin to people thinking they are CEO material, just because they can make a power point presentation.

People (I.T. guys included) will almost always go with what they are comfortable with. IIS is very easy to configure and you could have a Windows Server up and running in no time. With Apache, it's not so simple. Modifying text files gives the admins great control over nearly everything; but it's not so simple. And some n00b admin couldn't exactly master Apache in a weekend like they could IIS.

At least in higher education, you sometimes find yourself having to run 3rd-party software that requires IIS. In a nutshell we do all our in-house development on pure LAMP, but departments tend to buy commercial software that won't run on LAMP at all. This same software tends to own/modify/taint the IIS machines so they become single-purposed windows servers. Hopefully Vmware ESX is gonna tame that beast sooner or later for us.

Based on my experience with MS products, GUIs make really shitty configuration interfaces. You have to click all over the place to set things up, and there is no way to look at very many of the options at a time when they are spread across multiple tabs. Fine when you are following a "run sheet", but a total nightmare when you are trying to troubleshoot something.

Have you ever actually used the IIS or Exchange (or even Outlook) configuration GUI? <shudder>

to me it's easier to see/find stuff then when I have to scroll for miles through the config files on my apache servers

Not a very convincing argument.

First, text editors have this really nifty feature called "search". Takes you right to the string that you request.

Second, what if I want to see/verify all settings? What if I want to make sure that Server B is configured exactly the same as Server A? Much easier to scroll through (or diff) a config file than to click on every single frigging tab and subd

There is, in fact, a reason not to use Apache.The configuration/managment tools suck. In fact, they're mostly non-existent. To get the most out of Apache, you are going to be editing configuration files by hand.

Now, don't get me wrong, Apache is great, and dealing with the configuration issues is not THAT difficult, and the benefits are worth the effort. But MAN. IIS is *so* much easier to deal with when it comes to 99% of the configuration duties that you need to do on a web server. The defaults are sane,

Having used both extensively over the past 10 years, IMHO 90% of the config tasks are easier with IIS for a non-expert, but5% are MUCH harder, and the remaining 5% you just can't do at all. Period. It's that 5% that makes IIS a non-option for me personally. For some of the sites we host, either server would work fine, but in those cases, there is no reason to pay a license fee for IIS.

One of the other benefits of having worked with both apache and IIS is that that 90% of what is normally easier in IIS really isn't if you develop internal tools to do that work for apache. In fact, a single web page with just a few fields on it runs a script that sets up DNS, apache, firewall, database, chroot jail, and optionally even an entire virtual machine, fully configured and running.

It's just "by default" those scripts are not included with Apache like they are with IIS.

Also, once you learn the Apache syntax and understand how things work, it turns out that using an editor isn't any harder than the IIS GUI. In fact, it's usually MUCH easier/faster for anything repetitive.

If you are using Visual Studio dotNet as your development environment you are not going to find Apache works too well.

The netcraft survey is bunk because it measures a quantity that has always been irrelevant. In the past the market share of Apache was artificially inflated because most parked domains would sit on Apache boxes. Now Microsoft has identified that as an issue they are starting to get the advantage.

The quantity of interest is not who supplies the Web server but what the development platform is. As a practical matter any code of interest can run on ISS but rather less can run on Apache and less again on LAMP.

And there is no guarantee that the code engine will be visible in any case. You could easily have an IIS back end written in dotNET being served up through a squid front end.

And the rate of use says nothing as to whether the software is any damn good. There are still plenty of FORTRAN and COBOL coders even though the languages are abysmal.

"There are still plenty of FORTRAN and COBOL coders even though the languages are abysmal."

That's a pretty ignorant statement. I know very little about COBOL, but Fortran is a very useful language. It is extremely well suited to numerical and scientific computation. That's a small market, to be sure, but an important one. There's a reason why the most recent standard came out in 2003 and another is in the works (tentively Fortran 2008). There's a reason why Intel sells high performance compilers for two languages: C/C++ and Fortran, which they actively update.

There is no such thing as a "best" programming language. They are tools and you should use the right tool for the job. You can accomplish a given job with essentially any tool (by necessity, any Turing complete language can do anything any other can, including implement the other language) but that doesn't mean they are all created equal. Just because you don't like Fortran doesn't mean it doesn't have uses.

"It is extremely well suited to numerical and scientific computation."

I wish it wasn't true. It's nasty, horrible, ugly to write and maintain. But it is still true, it's damn fast. I write high performance EM simulators in C++. They're quite fast. On a really good day they'll reach the speed of the equivalent Fortran code. At best. I prefer C++ because I spend at least as much time messing with code as running it. The astrophysics guys here almost all write in Fortran. The protein folders too. If you're

At present.NET seems to be gaining ground as a platform. I know that apache supports some version of it, but if companies are looking to take advantage of all of the benefits of.net and the new WCF (like IIS hosted WCF services, which are as easy to set up as a config file,) then they probably go with something they can phone up support and get covered on. Also, with using Microsoft for.net there is no waiting for the Mono to get feature X covered. I think between ASP.NET ajax, and.NET 3.0, a lot of f

Since we've converted our systems and middleware development to C#.NET, all of our developers have become much much more effective. The defect rates of our new C# code compared to our old C++ code are microscopic. We've converted our Apache based SOAP server to ASP.NET's XML WebServices and found that the development is faster, the code is cleaner, and again the defect rate is down. Our web development is currently in PHP, but we've found that if our web developers write C# / ASP.NET, our systems developers can help out with quality control, supplying code samples and advice, and even directly coding for the web. We're in the process of planning the ASP.NET version of our web applications.

The simple fact is, whether you like Microsoft or not,.NET is a great platform for the rapid development of low defect applications. If you don't develop on Windows, give Mono a shot. I consider their successful efforts to be amazing.

For our purposes, the fact that we use.NET and we want to stay on the.NET train (advancements in IIS7 are going to be very useful to us) using IIS6 as our webserver is a no-brainer.

Apache certainly works, but the question for us is, why use Apache? What is so compelling about Apache that would make us want to give up IIS6? We've used Apache for years and continue to do so to this day, but it isn't doing anything special for us except hosting PHP scripts (the performance of which, even with an accelerator, could be better).

The person above asked if there's any compelling reason not to use apache.

I think the question to ask is if there's any compelling reason not to use IIS. I'm sure people will spew "because it's Microsoft and you dont want your website hacked", but that's not what I'm talking about. IIS has had some problems in the past, but these days it's pretty good.

The question is when an organization already has an investment in Windows, and local domains, management tools etc....is there any reason not to use IIS? Does apache provide anything above and beyond what IIS provides when it comes to general website hosting?

Running PHP/MySQL/PERL/PostgreSQL on windows is a pain in the butt. There is no automatic update mechanism like you get with almost any linux distribution, integration is poor, and support is almost entirely for running PHP/MySQL/PERL/PostgreSQL is for Linux.

Add Ruby on Rails, Python, and Tomcat to that list.The biggest reason to use Apache over IIS is that Apache runs best on *nix systems... and so does most of the rest of the best web-oriented server and dev software.

Plus, there are so many great command-line tools (or GUI tools that have a command line mode with a simple switch) which can be (carefully) integrated into web apps that simply aren't available (or don't work as well) on Windows, and open up all kinds of interesting possibilities. Windows doesn'

Yes, I'd say the proper choice would be to match the talent you have on your development team with the tools required to build the desired product. It wouldn't make sense to force a bunch of LAMP developers to switch to IIS/Windows/MSSQL just to become a "pure windows shop". It also would make no sense to force a team of IIS/ASP/DNET developers onto LAMP just to change OSes. At my place of work we have both, and neither is going to take over the other.

Reasons to use Apache:
1. It runs on any OS, so you are not tied down to windows. Don't read that as flamebait, it's a long-term general concern because if the next windows version is not something you want to have to buy, well that's too bad since support will end eventually. All the people running windows NT servers figured that out a few years ago.
2. Apache Modules here [apache.org]. There is quite a list.
3. Easy to mass-install, easy to backup configuration, easy to clone configuration, etc.
4. Just as easy to upgrade as IIS.

In fact the only reasons I could see you would want to use IIS is the initial configuration is not nearly as easy (which I've never understood why), or if you're a total MS shop (SQL Server and ASP) it makes sense to use IIS since they are designed to work well together.

Just as a rant, I've never met a ASP programmer that actually knew what they were doing, must less that knew any good programming practices. Mostly 2 week training from some consulting agency. gak. PHP is almost as bad, but not quite.

I know it's all trendy to hate Microsoft and all, but honestly, have you looked at IIS lately? Especially IIS7?IIS has had less than half a dozen security flaws *IN 4 YEARS*, compared to Apache which has had tons..NET has had about the same, compared to PHP which has also (and continues to have) tons of security flaws. Hell, one of the biggest names in PHP quit recently in protest over the poor security of PHP.

The fact of the matter is, IIS and.NET are very attractive, powerful, secure, and easy to use

On the one hand, mod_rewrite has made many of my customers happy. On the other hand, mod_rewrite has caused my hair to fall out, has costed two keyboards (flung to the wall), and countless spills of good coffee.

In short, I've come to regard it as the primary sign of the coming of the antichrist.

You can do the same type of thing mid-request stream with.Net and there are a number of ISAPI filters that do similar things (ISAPI_REWRITE comes to mind) if you don't want to use.Net. Finally, it's easy enough to code your own ISAPI filter to do the job just fine. In fact, if you're not a half bad coder you can develop something lighter than mod_rewrite because it does just what you need and no more.

Lastly, what I find almost funny is that most LAMP devs assume because a site is hosted on IIS that MSSQL is the backend. I've worked on a lot of IIS/.Net sites and about half are MSSQL and other half are MySQL. Each has its advantages and a smart development house will decide based on what it needs its RDBMS to do - not based on some software ethics.

1. You don't have to run Windows. You may pick and choose from a number of different OSs including Windows.2. Lower cost. You may choose the lowest cost platform for deployment. If for you that is Windows you can use Windows.3. Better security options. You may run Apache on secure Linux which does have a higher government security rating then is available for Windows. Or you could run on OpenBSD which does have a very good security history.4. No vendor lock in. IIS is single source as is the OS it runs on.

As long as the site is designed to support open standards and work cross browser, does it really matter what is running on the server side?

My take is that this is just more indication that MS's FUD campaign about patents is working.

That said, I have about a hundred servers, most running Linux, supporting a large complex web site. I see no reason to change to a MS based site, and due to the technology used, it would take a MASSIVE effort to port anyway.

Namely a little bit of boredom in the web world plus the difficulty of trying to find new and interesting sites now that folks have figured out how to manipulate Google rankings.

Plus the fact that you can now run many more LAMP web sites per server than was previously possible. I mean, figure it out -- how many virtual sites can a person run on a modern fully configured Apache server than they could in say, 1999 before the dot com bubble burst. CPUs cores are something like 4-5x more powerful if not more, hard disk arrays bigger and faster, and the configuration setups probably ten times better. So it takes less Apache servers to run more sites, yes?

Not surprising because we are moving away from "hobbies" to "packages."

By hobbies I mean how many new dot coms are being created? How many people are creating new and nifty content? Some sure, but the vast majority of folks are companies that see the web as a necessity and not a money maker.

The innovative companies need flexibility, power and tunability, which is given by Apache, and the LAMP stack. The corporations that see the web as a necessity just want to put information onto the Internet. They don't care about "social networks." They just care that their catalog can be viewed. And that is the domain of Microsoft, not Apache.

I personally see these statistics as a maturation of the web, not that Apache is loosing market share.

In the last 5 years... I went to 2 Universities. One of them was a crappy, private University whose entire program focused on Microsoft. It was one of those afterwork, pay us a lot of money for a degree thing. I left that place and went to a State University(soon to be the largest in the state). I was shocked to find out from the CS majors that they had a large Microsoft Curriculum as well. Apparently, Microsoft gives a lot of money to the Universities to ensure that they are a central part the curriculum. Since a lot of students are learning about ASP, Visual Basic and.NET... is it any surprise that these same students are going into the workplace and using these tools instead of a perl, php, ruby, python inside of Apache.

I'm surprised you aren't modded higher, frankly. This is the primary reasons open source isn't doing well. People stay with what they are comfortable with.
MS Office in high school => MS office in college => MS office in the workplace.
Windows in high school => Windows in college => Windows in the workplace.
Geeks are constantly in denial about these things because they are always working to make things better, faster, and more efficient. But "People", generally speaking, go with what's comfortable, easy, and common.
Drop down menus, radio boxes, etc are "common". Command line? Editting Text files? Apache better get out of the whole in a hurry. The server market is no longer a market where you can afford to be different. It's a commodity market, they are a dime a dozen, and if I can click a radio box as opposed to editing a text file - guess which I'm going to do?

Good grief! That radio button is the PROBLEM not the SOLUTION. I *hate* dealing with IIS and 2003 because of the GUI. No, I don't mind being able to click buttons and boxes -- much easier -- but trying to look at your configuration when a problem arises means going through all those zillion menus, boxes and buttons looking for the one that was clicked by mistake. I'd much rather just read a text config file. MUCH quicker.

Does it matter anymore? The point was made years ago. Apache's triumph on the web was touted during a time when we were trying to make a point that open source software was legitimate for large scale use in the real world. Everyone knows that now. In fact, open source has conclusively, and probably forever, denied Microsoft a monopoly in the server market. If they are making gains now (and yes, their biggest gains are most certainly in parking sites, to whom they probably pay megabucks for no other purpose than to skew the Netcraft survey) it isn't really relevant.

I think the main reason for this is that the quality of admins is dropping. I say this not because they are using a Microsoft product, but because more and more my interactions with supposed sysadmins are quite depressing.

I personally think IIS is a superior webserver to Apache. I speak as someone who's had to administer both systems, and like anything each has thier own quirks + benefits etc, but crucially...

Apache is not as modular as IIS (v7 that is). IIS7 you can literally strip it so bare, all it can do is send empty HTTP 200 responses - an absolute shell of a webserver. Not even file html/file-system support. Want disk-access? Turn on disk-access module. Want asp.net? Turn on the asp.net module. Absolutely everything (and really, everything) is a module that can be ripped out.

IIS6+ deals with HTTP requests at a kernel level. That is core functionality such as responses, caching, etc are all dealt with at ring0. Performance is unbeatable.

Oh and security? IIS6 has never been rooted, ever. Add-ons have been (asp.net for instance), but IIS6 has never been.

Oh, and it's locked down by default. And easy to administer.

In my opinion Linux is probably the better OS to host a webserver on, but IIS does spank Apache all over I'm afraid - mainly for the stated reasons above.

IIS6+ deals with HTTP requests at a kernel level. That is core functionality such as responses, caching, etc are all dealt with at ring0. Performance is unbeatable.

The biggest plus and biggest liability of the windos system. Running crucial non-kernel functionality at ring 0. Yes, it gives you performance. Early windos versions would've been unusable without trickery like that. At the same time, it's a security, reliability and debugging nightmare. It also makes it necessary to essentially re-write windos every few years, because you can't incrementally update all this low-level shit - it's too much to do it all at once, and it'll break in fascinating ways if you don't.

MS is - and always has been - an engineering shop. They never invented anything, and they don't do good design, either. What they're good at is the same thing the chinese are good at: Copy stuff from elsewhere and manufacture more of it cheaper. They're also really good at marketing.

Performance isn't really a problem when using Apache.Okay, when you serve a request, you're either running a program (in some way) to generate the content, or you're serving something already on disk, using the webserver itself.

In the first case, dynamic content, the specifics of the server are going to be lost in the noise. We benchmarked my company's webserver overhead at 3ms on a 100ms request, and that's pretty typical of web applications. Getting that down to 2ms is not going to increase overall perfor

Apache on windows is not a difficult install. I've done it many times, for multi-homed domains, and it works quite well.

People install IIS so they can use Microsoft's varied and highly efficient enterprise application development tools. The tools are superior for business needs, and so with them come the operating system and web server.

I continue to prefer Apache on FreeBSD (not Linux) as my primary platform if I want stuff to work right from the beginning, but on Windows 2003 or greater or Linux from the same vintage, practical performance (real-world factors that users and business cohorts will notice) is very, very close.

The operating system has grown up and so has the web server. The vast gulfs in performance are no longer so vast. I'm not sure how I feel about this either. Part of me will forever be nostalgic for the computer gang warfare days of the 1980s, when Apple II users snubbed PC owners, Commodore 64/128 users were lawbreaking maniacs, the weird kids used Ataris to make techno and the Amiga people were as annoying as the Macintosh people are today.

Interestingly, from the days of the 286 onward, finding home UNIXen was not as difficult as one might think. First AT&T, then Minix, then a number of ports of Berkeley and AT&T UNIXes came down the path. True, it required top-notch hardware, but that was an artifact of the time when most machines were 1-8 MHz boxes.

MS is good at this game of incrementally taking market share away from competitors. They have been doing it for years. They will match features, add luxuries, push it hard to business types, give it away, offer automated conversion... whatever they think it takes.

Nobody thought Office could replace WordStar, but MS beavered away at it, adding new features people liked and matching existing features, and now it's a distant memory. Same for Excel. The first versions of windows were jokes, but MS kept working on them and took the desktop over. Nobody used Windows as a server at first, but MS built NT and improved it and now they run the majority of small businesses and many larger ones. They had nothing in the database server market, but they bought SQL Server from Sybase and beavered away at it, and now they run a decent percentage of websites and many businesses. They were late to "the internet" but turned things round, built a browser that was the best for a while (IE5), and a web server that is now a serious contender.

Meanwhile Linux gains at the expense of Unix, and Linux geeks sit complacently back thinking they cannot be assailed. In reality the same forces that MS brough to bear on the desktop apply here: ignorance of alternatives, familiarity, PHBs, marketing, training, and, for the most part, the ability to do a decent job. Add to that the ability to easily integrate existing desktop/small business stuff, like connecting to COM objects, SQL server,.NET, Office, etc, all the stuff that millions of developers are already familiar with.

It makes me nervous to think that Microsoft could take the server off Unix/Linux as well. I don't think it's as far off as some might think. They are learning from Linux/Unix, in that their newer stuff is taking things like "xcopy deployment" and XML for ocnfig quite seriously.

Even accounting for the GoDaddy domain-parking nonsense, there's not much to these numbers. An IIS server is not equal to an Apache server in any way, shape or form. It would be like saying there are more IIS bicycles on the road than Apache locomotives, so therefore IIS is more important to the transport of people or goods. It's demonstrably bunk. While quantitative evidence is out there regarding applications and numbers of users per server, I think the following anecdotal bit sums it up nicely.

In a very large quasi-governmental organization, we have a major application that runs on a handful of Oracle systems and serves double-digit thousands of people with acceptable performance over the last half dozen years. There is an ill-thought-out project underway (a year into development) to replace this with a steaming pile of.NET. And it's a BIG pile.

How big? Follow me on this one: First they modeled the.NET application on the old client-server app, but the network chatter was 20x the capacity of the network because the MS-trained app architects could not wrap their heads around the idea of a constrained WAN. What used to be a small record lookup and update of about 300k over the wire turned into more than 6MB of inter-domain line noise.

Then they decided that WAN applications must mean that we wanted a web application (how silly of us), and they re-wrote it as a web app. Not understanding that a significant amount of those users are off-line and synchronize only once a day, the connection/session limits were quickly saturated even before many users complained that they simply could not connect.

The third solution proposed by Microsoft consultants and one of the largest Indian development houses? Install IIS on every remote user's laptop, and have SQL Server synchronize in the background so that the newly web-ified application can operate offline. Let me clarify that: For these thousands of remote roaming workers in the field, many with a public IP, there is one copy if IIS PER USER for a major MS application. And while every time this comes up the Indian developers mutter under their breath things so foul I didn't think you could say them in Hindi, the MS-employed wonks...BLINK... BLINK... don't seem to recognize there's even an issue.

So the discrepancy is not that IIS is "gaining" on Apache, but that IIS is being dumped out in the street in every cereal box and bubblegum wrapper as part of the.NET mess for purposes it's clearly incapable of serving and that even Apache would be no good for. Just my subjective opinion, but I don't think anyone would ever do this with Apache. The result is that a single project -- an abject failure of a bad design from every meaningful metric, and the willful ignorance of user requirements in favor of vendor fantasies -- shows up on a webserver market share survey as a several-thousand-instance win for MS. By all indication from MS consultants, this is not a unique event.

Apache is neat. Very neat.PHP is neat. Very neat.Compared to any other SSI solution that is.

...etc....

There is but one problem. The world and especially the web and it's technologies is moving along at a breathtaking pace. Apache is neat, but it's style of configuration is nearly 10 years old from back when XML was considered the hottest thing since sliced bread.Why isn't there a zero-fuss web interface backend built into Apache that enables me to configure anything I want with 3 clicks of a mouse (with a backend deactivation option of course). Why isn't there a version of PHP with a MySQL driven persistance layer and SQL-free serialisation built right into it?How come a little bit of marketing, screencasts and a website which, for once, doesn't look like shit, and suddenly people think Rails is the holy grail of webdeving? Rails and the hip project hype they kicked off is a very good thing, but it shouldn't stop just there.

Don't get me wrong. I'm convinced that Microsoft, in terms of available software technology, is an incarnation of evil and should be avoided at all costs unless there is a solid reason not to. 'Client wants Exchange' could be one. But we have to be realistic about this. It takes only a handfull of people at MS with 2 or more braincells, freshly assigned decision power and half a billion out of Microsofts piggybank to build an entire webstack that blows any OSS solution (Zope, Rails, Django and whatnot included) out of the water and into next wednesday, technology wise. Even the most advanced OSS webstack today has superfluos installation fuss one has to go through that should disapear ASAP. There is a lure of a truely zero-fuss.Net. Look at the countless Linux people flocking to Mac OS X to see what I mean.

IIS,.Net and whatever from MS not sucking to much is a reaction to the pressure the feel from OSS. They may be reacting to this, thus the rise in IIS hits.

Then again, MS bought Godaddy just to raise their level of IIS installs by a few percent, and LAMP machines are extremely Multi-Domain friendly. This Necraft study might just be reflecting this. And I have no doubt that should Apache drop to a real 30%, they'd get their shit together and start building a full integrated OSS webstack that picks up where Zope ends. And not only halfway there. I hope so anyway.

I don't know jack about the methodology Netcraft uses nor do they make it clear. The "top developers" attributes Google as the big winner, but there's no documentation on those stats either.

This page is pretty strange. http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/today/requested.html [netcraft.com] The site blink.nu is a microsoft press release machine of some kind and has ~1.6 times the number of queries of the next nearest site. Odd to say the least.

Conjecture aside, what's happening is all kinds of GPL(ish) projects are growing and the stats are being positioned as a loss for Apache. This is very similar to how NPD intellect royally screws Apple in favor of Microsoft by aggregating all PC's with Microsoft's OS against Apple. Disaggregate the numbers by vendor and you find Apple does extremely well in consumer segments.

As I have been following spam trends, I have noticed increasingly that a lot of spam is originating from compromised boxes within the US at hosting facilities. Some of these compromised boxes are LAMP boxes, but the majority of them are Windows boxes I have been finding. (sources from outside the US are somewhat irrelevant to me since I set up spamassassin rules that ranks spam from outside the US well above the minimum score... the vast majority of actual spam is coming from connections outside of the US even if the originators are still from the U.S.)

So as we see this increase in Windows servers on the net, I fear we'll see an increase in incidents of machines compromised for bot membership and on and on.

I'm *NOT* saying that Linux is more secure in this regard. As mentioned above, some compromised boxes are, in fact, LAMP boxes. I'm saying that Windows boxes are an easier target and are targeted more often and compromised successfully quite often with automated measures since they are all typically configured the same ways with the same directory structures, software patches and updates etc. (With the variety of Linux distros out there, there is far less incident of homogeny in system configuration which at the very least slows down automated procedures for compromises and take-overs.)

In any case, I think there's a distinction to be noted in that more frequently targeted doesn't mean less secure. (I hope G.W.Bush isn't reading this...) But given that Linux and Windows security is equal (indulge me), what does it mean when Windows is targeted more often?

I've never had any trouble configuring Apache. But then, I'm a geek. The problem isn't so much that Apache or PHP is losing out to IIS or.NET... the problem (as we see it) is that geeks are losing out to suits.

With this month's survey, Netcraft has begun tracking Google's custom web server software known as GFE (Google Front End), which is currently found on 2.7 million hostnames, or 2.3% of all sites. Google customizes its web infrastructure, with in-house solutions for software and hardware, including energy-efficient servers and power supplies. GFE is the server found on Blogger sites at blogspot.com, while Google uses GWS (Google Web Server) on some other services, although none with the volume of hostnames seen at Blogger.

There is also a serious discrepancy in that other stats seem to show IIS on the last moments of extinction [securityspace.com] in hi-tech zones like Germany. NetCraft report doesn't really have any explanation of the figures it presents.

What's really problematic is that over time NetCraft has become less informative. No mention has been made lately of what the changes in market share are attributed to. In years past, even a percent or two got a few lines of explanation or analysis. Did one of the service packs or 'security' upgrades install and turn on IIS for all Windows users? Or are more domain parkers and cybersquatters using IIS in the server identification string?

This downturn started last year when MS paid GoDaddy to swap out (or claim to swap out) its domain parking. GoDaddy did get the OSS community to lay off by throwing some chump change to OpenSSH and we can see the result of these last 12+ months. The money did some good, but if it's just a one-off donation, then it's questionable whether then benefit offsets the harm. Either way it's funny to see GoDaddy decision makers thinking they can buy indulgences [thehostingnews.com]. Maybe it ought to become an annual fee.

This downturn started last year when MS paid GoDaddy to swap out (or claim to swap out) its domain parking.

Going to karma hell for this but, tell me, is paying someone (if they did) better or worse than Bruce Perens faking host headers [netcraft.com] in order to boast Apache ratings? Or is that even sillier than your assertion that MS sneaked IIS back on by default? (which of course wouldn't make a big dent anyway as more Windows boxes are behind firewalls than in front, and those ones already exposed on port 80 are probably doing it on purpose).

As the Perens stunt shows netcraft may not just be relying on host headers at all as you seem to think.

There is the problem... by saying "I took it to mean" you are making assumptions just as you are deriding at GP for doing. How do you KNOW that "active" for them doesn't mean "responded?"Do they actually compare the HTML and count anything above a 95% similarity as one site? That is what they would have to do in order to be analyzing it as you assume they are. Anyone going to that trouble would, as GP suggested, provide some modicum of an explanation as to their methods if for no other reason than to say "S

However, what about XP? Of the MS server platforms MS Server 2003 has negligable market penetration compared to XP.

SP2 firewalls it by default, IIRC. Also, XP is not a server platform, so I don't know why you'd compare 2003 to XP as servers.

It's common enough for MS patches and upgrades and services packs to turn things on or off, change configurations or just plain break something. So it's happened before, and since most of us have to work and don't have time or interest to follow the details of MS Windo

While you're correct that XP's firewall can block IIS, it isn't even an issue on most machines. The default configuration, even for XP Pro, doesn't install IIS. As with Vista, you much go into the Windows Components section of the (Add/Remove) Programs window and select it. In XP you'll also need the install media; in Vista IIS is part of the installation image (this is part of why Vista's install footprint is so big; every feature, even those you aren't going to use, is copied to the hard drive at install

Since it's not installed out of the box on XP, Win2k3 or Vista, its then someone installing it because they want to.

Someone installing IIS on their home computer is more than likely aware of Apache and didn't install it for whatever reason.

Maybe the decline in Apache is due to the leaps IIS has taken in both reliablity (4 of the top 10 hosts with the best reliablity are running W2k3), supportability, expandiblity and security. Not to mention OOTB it can do a lot more than Apache does OOTB.

I disagree. While Twitter's posts tend to be vacuous, insipid, information-free, or merely incorrect on occasion, it isn't entirely clear to me that this differentiates Twitter's posts from, oh, probably half of the other posts at Slashdot these days. If the only difference is that Twitter has an opinion that annoys some people who use their mod points to punish people with differing opinions. Although Twitter can't express it very well, Twitter's opinions tend to be rooted in the notion that Microsoft i

In case you haven't noticed, the brain-trust at Microsoft doesn't sit still, and they have the financial and monopolistic resources to try and try again until they get it right. Moreover, as C# and.NET have shown, when you get the right people involved (Anders Hejlsberg) on making an in-house version of a very compelling technology (Java), Microsoft is more than capable at delivering a winner.

In the case of IIS 7, they have finally decided to create a Windows webserver in the modular blueprint of Apache. The betas of IIS 7 show that performance and security are better than anything that's come before it -- not just any IIS, but any webserver. Hell, the guys at Zend are saying that Zend on IIS 7 will be the most robust way to deploy PHP! And this is all built on the evolved form of Windows 2003 server, which has been the most secure O/S ever released by MS, something that a even a n00b with one weekend of training can lock down as tight as your favorite flavor or Linux.

Rather than stand around and argue about it, y'all need to get to work on Apache 3... and get ready to play catchup to MS again. The insecure days of IIS 5 are long gone; you've got your work cut out for you.

I admin both win2003 and Debian boxes. What you say may be true, but you don't address the COST of windows-server-2007.

In my particular environment (high-availability, low-cpu count) microsoft license costs are extremely high compared to the same feature set in Linux. If you move into high-availability high-cpu count the costs are astronomical.

I have a sneaking suspicion that either:

A. Microsoft is gaming the system explicitly. (ex. Netcraft adjusts their collection methods)B. Microsoft is gaming the system implicitly. (ex. the Office back end crack pipe.)

The idea that even an idiot parking domains would **pay** for something they previously got free is implausible.

OT CommentI suspect some of the.net fanboys in this post are shills, because I just don't find it *that* much better than a Free stack.